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jkinney3 writes to mention that DARPA's mad scientists have undertaken a new program designed to create synthetic organisms, complete with a "kill switch." The project, dubbed BioDesign, is dumping $6 million into "removing the randomness of evolutionary advancement" by creating genetically engineered masterpieces. "Of course, Darpa's got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they'll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create 'tamper proof' cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, 'similar to a serial number on a handgun.' And if that doesn't work, don't worry. In case Darpa's plan somehow goes horribly awry, they're also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch."

"If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands to new territory, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously."

History has no evidence of any organism managing to evolve away from a lethal or maladaptive feature.

Well, you're more right than you know. Baby seals haven't evolved to withstand harder clubs. Cows haven't managed to evolve into anything other than steak. Us humans haven't manage evolve away from war.

Modern cows are the result of HUMANS selecting for traits, not nature. Although even if that were not true, I'd argue that becoming tasty has been hugely beneficially for them. Why else would there be over a billion of them on the planet?

The difference is it sounds like they are going for something microscopic, some sort of engineered bacteria or something. Completely engineering an organism from the ground up on the macro scale is I'm going to assume rather implausible.

If this is in fact the case, then mutation becomes a much bigger issue because the population sizes are extrodinary, and generations are far far shorter. Cows take years to make new cows, but bacteria can go through dozens of generations a day.

Modern cows are the result of HUMANS selecting for traits, not nature.

This is a common misconception. Humans do not operate outside of nature. The law of natural selection includes the efforts of whalers hunting whales and conservationists trying to protect whales. The pigs that are reportedly wrecking havoc in parts of the southeast are not alien, simply new arrivals. The humans who make TV shows proclaiming the end of life as we know it due to the pig infestation are one little piece of the same natural

Consider this: the way plants are arranged in virgin forest is natural, whereas the way plants are arranged in my backyard garden is not. But, my desire to order what seems chaotic is natural. Not just natural for a human, but a part of nature. When (American) football is played on artificial turf it seems unnatural, but my point is that the human ability to create artificial turf exists within the realm of nature, because there is no way for anything to exist outside of nature. This is in my opinin a funda

If you compare their (population level) fates to those of pretty much any other large mammal, you'd see that docile deliciousness is more adaptive than pretty much any trait that won't get you a starring role in Alien...

The analogue for vegetarians would be maize, arguably the most successful species in the history of human civilization. To bring this conversation fork back on topic, it's interesting to note that modern corn is the result of several mutations that make the plant much less viable in the wild, and dependent upon humans for survival. Even with an engineered "kill switch" there's no guarantee that these artificial organisms won't encounter some other microorganism that f

There are approximately 1.5 billion cows in the world, which is orders of magnitude more than anything else in their weight class. In terms of biomass, they are one of the most successful land animals ever to exist on earth. Cow DNA will be replicating for a very long time.

The primary reason for the success of cows is the fact that the recipe for steak is encoded in their DNA. They also spend most of their usable energy towards making more steak.

Evolutionary success does not mean being on top of the food chain. High-level predators are usually, as a species, much more vulnerable to extinction.

I prefer your funny and sarcastic comment:-) I was going to post the logical: There may be unexpected mechanisms (including mutations) that might unintentionally trigger the kill switch. Given some chance of triggering it, a life form without it is by definition more fit and darwin will select those without it (or with it damaged). This may actually be a nice lab experiment in evolutionary biology.

All it would take is a mutation in the 'kill switch' vital regions of the DNA to disable it. If it's not being actively used, disabling it will confer no advantage or disadvantage.

In other words: having a kill switch or not having one - either way - won't affect the organism on a daily basis. Mutations to that gene group won't be phenotypically visible until you try to activate it. Activating it applies an extreme selective pressure toward those who don't have it. Turn it on, and the mutated progeny remain.

History has no evidence of any organism managing to evolve away from a lethal or maladaptive feature. The killswitch should persist in the population indefinitely.

That's exactly what came to my mind when I read it. We can make very sophisticated kill switches including ones that are coupled to positive selective pressure, so the evolution away from it is strongly inhibited. But even in this case my money would be on the "randomness of evolution', as they put it, taking care of it in the long term. Oh, and as we are talking about bacteria with 20 minutes generation time, long term is really not that long.

Before the government got involved, health care in the US was affordable to even the poor.

There were also some advances in medicine in the meanwhile that raised the price independent of government involvement. Chemotherapy back in the day may have been cheap enough to afford out of pocket, but that's because it was booze.

I guess you could still claim that since the government funded much of the research that led to these advances, they were still responsible though.

The idiots who look at the past through rose-colored glasses really piss me off -- there were no "good old days". The government programs we have today were largely the result of a problem needing to be addressed. What, you think that the magical budget fairy appeared and said, "Hey everybody! Let's give money for health care to people who can already afford it!"

There is something supremely retarded about you kids. You see government fail miserably at almost everything it does, yet you somehow believe the solution is more government control.

And there is something fundamentally retarded about someone who believes that an unregulated system would result in a better outcome. Newsflash, retard -- when entities are allowed to act completely in their own self-interest, they do so, to the detriment of others. The insurance industry is a private tax on health care (a portion of everything lines someone's pockets). Why shouldn't the beneficiary be the general public (via a federal system) instead of a small group of extremely wealthy people?

Before the government got involved, health care in the US was affordable to even the poor.

Leeching out bad humors was less expensive than an MRI is.

Of course your statement is untrue. It was a lack of available healthcare that caused medicare and medicade to be enacted to fill the gap.

There is something supremely retarded about you kids. You see government fail miserably at almost everything it does, yet you somehow believe the solution is more government control.

Perhaps because we see that non-government-controlled healthcare in the US is unaffordable, and we notice that it is private healthcare charging the government those high prices. We likely also notice that things like that law that makes it illegal for medicare to bargain for cheaper drugs was written by private healthcare companies.

More likely though, we just notice that everyone else has cheaper (often by half), more effective, universal healthcare than we do.

Please feel encouraged to mod me off-topic, right after you do the same to the parent. This isn't an article on healthcare or right-wing ranting about a time that never existed.

Listen. Your anecdotal claims backed up by zero statistics are surely fascinating. And I'm so excited that here in the "science" section of slashdot, hearsay is apparently super awesome.

If you want to go back to 50s medicine, you're welcome to it. People who have heart problems can die twenty years earlier. Severe forms of diabetes can go back to being lethal. Patients with mental illnesses can be lobotomized and put in a walled garden somewhere. Let's just throw out the massive advances in medical technology just so you can make some cheap, baseless, and most importantly, false political points.

Medical care is now highly specialized, with many, many fields, staffed by many different doctors, and I can guarantee you that that leading oncologists, heart surgeons, and neurosurgeons will not visit your house for an extra fifty cents. Sorry, but your childhood fantasy is just a childhood fantasy.

Out in the rest of civilization, the best way to cope with the increase of medical technology is to socialize it to reduce overhead. This is because it is very difficult to incentivize keeping someone healthy in a pure market. Without regulations, companies have no reason not to charge you outrageously for everything, since the cost you're willing to pay to live his virtually no limit.

these arguments come down to a moral one: is it okay to forcibly take from one person in order to provide a basic level of care for another? I don’t think that’s morally sound, in fact, I think it’s horribly unjust

Ah. So, building roads is okay. Rail, airports, municipal buildings, all fine. Fighter jets, tanks, helicopter gunships, and we're still on the moral high ground. And the second an orphaned child receives state funded care, you think it's "horribly unjust." You're really just full of shit, aren't you?

You will always be forced to make unconscionable choices: who deserves to bear the burden of supporting the others? Why shouldn’t we take equal amounts from everyone, why should some bear a higher burden than others from a moral perspective? What do you define as the bare minimum that everyone deserves?

jkinney3 writes to mention that DARPA's mad scientists have undertaken a new program designed to create synthetic organisms

Ok, this stupid meme that everyone who works with applied biology is some sort a crazed wild eyed 'mad scientist' arrogantly playing God really needs to die. If you can't say something without that sort of emotional language, don't say anything at all.

Putting aside the sarcasm, any self-replicating technology, or technology that could be self-replicating, needs to have multiple safeguards in place to prevent over-replication. Unless you are willing to declare any such research absolutely off limits and enforce it somehow, then I think they should be credited with doing the right thing here.

I always have the impression it would be better to use robotic technology as body implants to improve human capabilities. Read: Why should we create robots instead of us becoming the robots/cyborgs? Wouldn't this sort of solve the controlling problem at the root? Of course such a choice might have it's own perhaps unpleasant implications, which I haven't thought of yet...

That what popped into my mind. "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

It seems as though the "kill switch" option is an attempt to hard-wire an equivalent to Asimov's laws of robotics (obey all orders / don't harm humans / protect self).However, Asimov's "I, Robot" stories were written to highlight how even something hard wired could have its pitfalls - and that was someone who wrote the stories and also the 'rules' behind the stories.

You wonder if our technology is developing faster than our enlightenment? We already have enough weapons to kill everybody on the planet 100 times over, and our top priority is watching "Jersey Shore"... does that answer your question?

As they used to say in the '60s, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate!" No, wait... that's what they used to say in Chemistry Lab. In the '60s, they said, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem!" Saying "People are fine if you give them enough TV to watch" is basically the same as saying "Heroin addicts don't bother you much if you just give them a enough drugs to keep them happy." Just because your not actively tearing down society doesn't necessarily

"We already have enough weapons to kill everybody on the planet 100 times ov"And yet we haven't. How is more 'enlightened' the person that doesn't build them, or the person who builds them, but does not use them. It takes a hell of a lot of will power not to use something you have.

"and our top priority is watching "Jersey Shore"."no it's not, but we have managed to conquer most our basic needs:Sex, Food, Kids, Shelter. That leaves plenty of leisure time. A few people choose to watch incredible insipid TV.

But hasn't that always been the way things worked.Frankly I feel doing this on planet is about as stupid as above ground nuclear testing.This is why we need a space program. Doing this kind of research on say the moon seems like a much better plan than anywhere on earth.If not there maybe one of the dry valley's in the Antarctic.

However, over the last few decades, we have developed the ability to destroy all life on this planet. 100 years ago we couldn't do that.

And while we have matured in some ways (we have not destroyed ourselves yet in a nuclear war) I don't think we have developed far enough to wisely use some of the military technology, like this one, which we are now developing.

The effects of a nuclear war are immediate for everyone. OTOH, this technology has the potential to

Great... now I can't get this image of Jeri Ryan in a blue screen of death out of my mind! Thanks a lot! If she was running MacOS, she would only be attracted to other women, so let's hope like hell she's running Linux, that's the only way we have any chance of... uh, successfully interfacing with her I/O port(s).

Reading about that kill switch, I'm reminded about the quote from Jurassic Park about how Life always finds a way. I'm not sure that say 20-30 years post development when we may need a kill switch that it'll still work. Because things probably won't go haywire to the point of needing a kill switch right away. And even if they do, if the problems get worked out and these things become more common, I don't know if the kill switch tech will be updated with each iteration to account for possible evolutionary

It won't matter. After "those with the disabled kill switch" kill off our ancestors, the history books will be written to proclaim the uprising of the chosen as a pivotal point for the betterment of humanity.

We will be remembered as a plague upon the Earth that created its own demise.

The killswitch needs to be incorporated into critical sections of the organisms DNA to give it even a chance of working. The deadly gene needs to have a beneficial purpose, or (even without selective pressure) the section that codes for the killswitch will randomly mutate with no adverse effect on the organism.

To put it another way, a car alarm built into your rear bumper is not nearly as useful as one built into the ignition.

If DARPA wants to follow movie themes, maybe a light review of the SyFi Series "Caprica". The basic concept is that when one dies, their memories are downloaded into a clone, the clone is "animated" and there you are, ready for the morning rush hour. Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in another movie variation of this concept, "The 6th Day". If the Bad Guys can't kill you, then elementary solvable problems like Toyota's can be effectively discounted. But if DARPA wants to get snotty with the bad guys, then

Dr. Simon Tam: A phrase that's encoded in her brain, that makes her fall asleep. If I speak the words, "Eta...Jayne Cobb: Well don't say it!Zoë: It only works on her, Jayne.Jayne Cobb: Oh... Well, now I know that.

In the novel Systemic Shock by Dean Ing [wikipedia.org], special ops agents have devices in their skulls to provide radio communcations, data processing, and a remote kill switch. Ostensibly, the kill switch is for cases where an agent is captured, and is only to be used if the agent explicitly requests termination... but some of the agents suspect that they may be terminated for reasons other than explicit request. Decent novel; moderately recommended.

The killswitch in Systemic Shock is a cortex bomb. Not sure how messy, we don't actually see it happen in the novel. (Some of the agents know that is happened to one of their own, but the event is not described.)

You presume that they are talking about creating intelligent life, when in reality that are almost certainly talking about bacteria. All that would be necessary to prevent the kill switch from being bred out would be to make it a part of a vital gene. This way, if the gene is modified, then the organism is already going to be non-viable, so it wouldn't matter if the kill switch was broken.

SARS is claimed as being a case where things in the lab screwed up and someone become infected.Swine Flu was also apparently mishandled, the virus being recreated from a previous similar outbreak decades ago.